


not one speck will remain

by FreshBrains



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Rising (2007)
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-27
Updated: 2014-04-27
Packaged: 2018-01-20 23:39:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1530023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreshBrains/pseuds/FreshBrains
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal can smell them before he sees them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not one speck will remain

He dreams.  He dreams and he cannot help it; sometimes things cannot be helped, they cannot be controlled.  Hannibal has had many years to learn to stop screaming in his sleep, but that doesn’t stop the other dreams—the ones that come in a distant, untouchable haze.

He walks in the woods on an autumn afternoon, the sun low overhead; the leaves are gold and orange.  He’s at peace because he’s in a grey, cool haze, a wet dirt path that doesn’t look like the estate grounds in Lithuania or the brush of Wolf Trap, Virginia.  It’s a place he’s seen a million times, but it’s a place that rings hollow.

Hannibal can smell them before he sees them.  First, the smell of milk, slightly soured but warm in the cool air, along with a fever of illness and the black of death.  Behind it is the odor of diaper powder.  It’s a scent combination Hannibal remembers too well, but it has faded into a shadow—sometimes he wonders if he made it up in his dream.  He knows that is impossible. 

Then comes the oil of cloves—spicy-fruity, hot, sweet.  He can practically feel its ache on his fingertips, the way the oil would make them throb.  He hasn’t seen her since he was a young man, but her smell lingers always.  The smell comes with a spike of fear and arousal low in his belly, the kind that only comes now with the smell of cooking meat.

After that is a new smell, one that still hovers in the air when the conversation turns in the room.  Body mist, cheap and store-bought, with a girlish tang of grapefruit.  Clean soap.  Fresh blood.  The soft fur of a slain animal.

The mist clears across the dirt road and they are there, waiting for him.

Lady Murasaki is as he remembers her, but more smudged somehow, grey around the edges.  Her long inky hair is streaked elegantly with grey and she has lines around her clever mouth, but she wears the cream silk robe he once loved, her legs smooth and her feet bare on the earth.  She stands beneath the swaying whips of a green-yellow willow tree, the branches brushing her face.

“My lady,” he murmurs, his voice suddenly young again, a boy and a man at once.  He looks down at his body but sees nothing, he is not there, he is not real.  “My lady Murasaki.”  He is brought back to Paris, to the bath, to their almost-love.  To her vanishing.

She turns her head, only slightly, like she’s waiting for the next clap of thunder in a storm.  “Come, girls,” she says, holding out a hand, and from the other side of the great, blooming tree, Abigail appears, a child cradled in her pale arms.

Hannibal has taught himself how to think, how to feel.  He has taught himself how to react in ways that will keep him safe.  But his breath catches in his throat, pulls at his chest, and he wants badly to stop feeling.

“What’s the matter?” Abigail asks Murasaki, voice lilting and innocent, the way it was before she confessed, before she killed Nicholas Boyle.  It was a façade before, a carefully crafted way of morphing herself into that innocent girl, and Hannibal saw right through it—but under that willow, she is _free_ , she is a child.  She wears a pale pink cotton sundress and has a crown of daisies in her dark hair.  Her feet are bare as well, toes curled in the damp grass.

Hannibal knows it is Mischa in her arms, not only by the smell but because there was no way _not_ to—he’d spent a thousand nights trying to forget the silk of her hair, the softness of her arms and tummy, the way she smiled.  But there were some things that were forever.  Mischa was as she was when she was a baby before they had to run—soft, sweet, plump, her face turned into Abigail’s chest.  Hannibal sees a flash of silver in the milky sunlight; Mischa still wears her bracelet on her chubby wrist.

Murasaki nods down the path and into the fog in Hannibal’s direction.  “Did you hear that?”  She looks strong, ready to draw her blade and protect her girls.

Abigail follows Murasaki’s gaze, brow crinkled in sweet confusion.  “I don’t think so.”  She takes Mischa’s little hand in her own, giving her fist a shake.  “What about you, little one?  Did you hear anything?”

Mischa turns away from Abigail’s body, her sleepy eyes opening.  She looks down the path and into the mist, her eyes big and dark and completely unseeing.  She looks up at Abigail and shakes her head.

“Mischa,” Hannibal whispers, and it comes out like a croak.  He hasn’t said her name without screaming it in his fevered sleep since her death and it feels like wind, like a hiss of steam.  “Mischa, _mano sesuo_.”  He steps forward, reaches for her, but he has no arms to hold her in.

Murasaki touches Abigail’s arm, pulling her away, into the mist.  “Come, girls.  We are not needed here.  There is nothing here for us.”

Abigail looks back in Hannibal’s direction.  Abigail, his last girl, the one he didn’t protect, the one he actually _wanted_ to protect.  His last betrayal.  She can see him; he can tell by the way her mouth falls and her eyes widen.  Or maybe she just knows he’s there, somewhere, somehow.  But she turns away and tightens her hold in Mischa, letting the little girl cuddle into her chest.  “You’re right.  There’s nothing here for us.”

(There is never blood in his dreams.  No blood, no screams, no fear.  That cannot exist in this world.)

“Wait,” Hannibal says, but it always ends like this.  The path, the tree, the smell in the wet, cold air.  Then they leave, and no matter how far he reaches, how hard he strains, he can never, ever touch them again.

**Author's Note:**

> Heavily inspired by events and images from _Hannibal Rising_ , and could chronologically take place anytime after the first season of "Hannibal."


End file.
